Over the moon

What a day!  What a day!

But I must back up to last Thursday.  That's when the tide started to turn.  After getting nowhere fast with the passport call center (again), I hung up the phone pretty steamed and practically in tears.  I decided that for the umpteenth time, I would search the house again for Madeline's passport, in case we never gave it to them in the first place.  Only this time I decided to look in places it shouldn't be.  And what do you know?  There it was....mixed up with Patrick's business docs.  Yep, it was under our noses the entire month, and we didn't know it.  The last four weeks were extremely stressful, and I wouldn't want to relive them.  But I'm grateful to have Madeline's Chinese passport in my possession, even if we did have it the entire time.  Big big relief!  Now we can apply for our visas.

Also on Thursday, I decided to give our immigration officer call.  Remember, the one whose name escaped me?  She informed me that our applications had just come across her desk that day and that I should call her back Monday afternoon, as she would likely have us approved by then.  Great.  I'm on it.

Then we had the cake we ordered for Havi...oh a month ago.  We still hadn't received the photos, and it had us worried.  Other families adopting from the same orphanage waited days to receive their cake photos.  We were waiting almost a month.  I expressed my concern to Ann at Red Thread China.  On Saturday, she told me she was finally able to communicate with the orphanage, and that she would try to get us the photos on Monday.  Well, it goes without staying I started checking my email like crazy Sunday night and Monday morning.

Sure enough, right in the middle of our school lessons this morning, I saw the email.  So Caleb and I made a mad dash to the computer to pull them up.  And here they are!!!  And yes, for those of you who know your Chinese cartoons, that is Pleasant Goat on her cake!

Then this afternoon, as I called our immigration officer to check on the status of our applications, I could barely get a word in before she told me that she approved us this morning!  So...that means the approval will be forwarded to the National Visa Center (NVC) where the approval notice will be cabled (electronically delivered) to Guangzhou, where the immigration interview will take place in China.  It should take about a week to ten days to get the approval cabled.  Then Havi's visa application (Article 5) can be dropped off.  Two weeks later it will be picked up and then delivered to CCCW@ when we will wait for our Travel Invitation (or Travel Approval, TA.)  TA will come 2-3 weeks later.  So, we should definitely be able to travel in June, following Madeline's dance recital.  

Today was truly an amazing day.  To see our daughter smiling and laughing...that's priceless.  To jump over one more paperwork hurdle...icing on the cake (couldn't resist saying that).

I do promise to give another update soon.  Life just has us busy.  A good busy, but still busy.  I'll get those iPhone snapshots up soon.

Tree trimming

I realize it's Christmas Eve, but I just had to share these photos before Christmas came and went.  There aren't too many, but they mean so much to me.  Why? 

Because we really didn't know if/when the tree trimming was going to happen!  You see, after we bought our new house back in November, we learned we had some major roof repairs that needed to happen.  Now why would a roof repair keep us from putting up our tree?  Well, we needed to have the "fake skylights" replaced with real ones. And their location happened to be right where we wanted to put up our tree.  It's kind of hard to put up a tree when you have scaffolding like this up inside your house.  (It also made it difficult to maneuver during the day because all the bedrooms and bathrooms were "blocked off" from the other side of the house where the kitchen and school area are.)

{Taken with my iPhone}

Thankfully they finished the drywall work last Saturday.

So last Sunday, yep...just one week ago, we managed to get the tree from the attic in our old house and begin to decorate it.  Madeline took her brother's camera so she could capture the moment too.

Underneath the tree are some village pieces the kids painted during a playdate they had earlier this month.  While our tree isn't fancy or worthy of a magazine spread, it's adorned with some very special ornaments that mean so much to us.  It was fun to pull them out of the boxes and reminisce about when we first bought them or when they were given to us.

I hope you all enjoyed trimming your trees as much as we did.  And I can't wait to check out all the fun Christmas photos which are sure to hit bloggyland with a bang this week!

Madeline's party...in photos

As the hostess of the party, I didn't have much time to snap photos, but I was determined to catch a few of the kids enjoying themselves on the big waterslide.  Remember how I said the waterslide peeps were going to come Friday night to set up the slide?  Well, that didn't happen.  Around 5:00pm that night, we suddenly lost power....as in, we had to leave the house and eat dinner out and not come back til bedtime kinda of power outage.  That meant we had to call the waterslide peeps and tell them they couldn't come set up.  Thankfully, power was restored by the time we arrived back home, around 9:00pm.

Anyway, the waterslide peeps were running late Saturday morning.  So my hopes of enjoying the waterslide before our guests came were long lost.  We kept the guest list small on purpose- just a few friends and family. I somehow managed not to snap a photo of Patrick going down the slide.  Boo.  He really enjoyed it with the kids.  I managed to get down it once most people left. So, here are a few photos from the party. 

The kids enjoyed going back and forth between the slide and the pool.

 So glad I had my 35mm.
Otherwise I would've had to climb over the neighbor's fence to get a shot of the entire slide.  Told ya it was big!

 I was too short and too lazy to find a better way to elevate myself for the shots of kids actually coming down the slide.

 Taking a lunch break with her cousin.

 The big kids also got a turn.
My BIL Andy didn't have the same height limitation I had.  So he managed to capture a great shot of me going down with my sister.  He even caught me in the air.  And I won that race, by the way. ;)  Love ya, girl.

 Caleb really didn't want to take a break.  He was the last one to go down.

Some news on the adoption front...

We were able to walk in early yesterday for fingerprinting for our I-800A application.  Woo hoo.  I love our "local" but not so close office.  We're still hopeful we can send off our dossier by the end of this month.

Celebrating Madeline

As I mentioned earlier this week, I took Caleb and Madeline down to the park/pier to enjoy the "sunset" on Madeline's 2 year Gotcha Day anniversary.  I haven't been out to watch the sun set in a while.  So I thought it would be a nice thing for us to do together and for me to brush up on my sunset taking photo skills.  But as you can see, the sun forgot to show up for our little date.  The kids, though, indulged me a bit as I tried to get in some photography homework.

Madeline really wanted to play on the playground.  She had had enough of me and my camera. lol

But Caleb convinced her to hang in there just a wee bit longer.

Then I suggested we head over to the pier to watch the fisherman.

The kids were tickled to see this Great White Egret.  But as we approached, he naturally took off.

He came back to the pier, though, and they had yet another chance to get close.  

This time I managed to get a reasonable shot of him mid flight when he took off again.

Caleb and Madeline were so intrigued by the fisherman.  They probably could've sat there all night watching them.

And then...as the sun slooooowy dropped lower in the sky, some rays finally peeked out above that cloud that had lingered so close to the horizon.

I love living on this narrow barrier island.  I love that we have sunrises over the ocean and sunsets over the river.  I can't wait to go back and capture more sunsets when the sky actually cooperates.

Madeline had fun, too, snapping photos of the sunset with my phone.

And then it was time to head home.

And take one more rest and assess those sunset photos.

We truly had a lovely day celebrating our big girl.  The only thing missing was Baba.
We're so glad he's back because we missed him something terrible.

For more Sunday Snapshots, pop on over to Stefanie's blog.